Continued from part 4
The Internet Dwellers were part of two exhibitions called "The Electronic Superhighway: Travels with Nam June Paik" and "The Electronic Superhighway: Nam June Paik in the 90s" The traveling exhibition ran between 1994-1998 and appeared in multiple museums in the United States.
I just found a website from Swatch (Paik's designed a watch for them.) that has some information about the exhibition.
"Paik created the Internet Dwellers as masks, each representing a different, remote society, all linked by the Internet, a network of networks, linking virtually everyone, anywhere, with access to a computer."
Predicting the Future
This show is based on a phrase Paik coined, "The Electronic Super Highway" in 1974. And comes from a paper he wrote called "Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society - The 21st Century is now only 26 years away"
I spend years off and on trying to find this paper. But I have put it on my website for download.
It was written for theRockefeller Foundation as a research paper. I did a lot of research and finally found the full copy of the paper at the Rockefeller Archive Center and they graciously digitized it for me.
His paper encouraged solving a wide swath of problems with technology. He wanted more public television, he predicted the establishment of thousands of TV channels and wanted to have artistic programming on many of them. He saw channels dedicated to single artists. He encouraged the building of a national network to connect computers together and called it the electronic super highway. He saw it as a "new kind of nuclear energy for information and the improvement of society".
To him the corporate control of what appeared on commercial television channels in 1976 was limiting new ideas, artistic innovation, education and the economy.
He predicted that one day people would use the highway for education and sharing videos. He also thought it would save the environment as people would not need to travel so much. He really wanted to make sure that an artistic culture could make up a large amount of content on the internet.
He promoted the electronic super highway as a source of economic expansion. His hope was that it would employ artists to create content to fill a desire for a growing interest in beauty. He wanted the arts to participate in this growing economy fueled by this network of networks.
The Hidden Message
After reading the paper I realized that the video montage in the eyes of the Internet Dwellers aligns with the content of this paper. The paper mentions factory work being replaced with services, minimization of travel due to teleconferencing, robotic automation and an information economy. These themes appear in the eyes of the dwellers. See some still shots I have captured from two of the Internet Dwellers below.
The videos in all of the Internet Dwellers I have found seem to illustrate the themes of this paper.
The internet was just beginning to be built at a few universities and Nam June Paik wanted funding for a worldwide network for artists to collaborate and show their work.
Next time we get back to finding more of the Internet Dwellers.